Seven Types of Ambiguity

by Elliot Perlman

  He is around at the side. Anna hasn’t called the police or else they haven’t arrived. The photographer looks at me and doesn’t try to explain who he is or what he is doing. He can see that I know. He runs now, calling out something, some kind of apology, but he is only running further into my property. A skinny man who has done this before, he tucks the camera under one arm as he runs. What does he think is going to happen? He runs along the side of the yard between the fence and the trees. I have never moved so fast.

  “You fucking prick!” I say, breathless. By now we have reached the backyard and I lunge at him, using him to break my fall. His camera drops to the stone paving around the pool.

  “Mister, there’s been a mistake,” he says, breathing hard and trying to get me off him.

  “No mistake here, you fucking cunt. That’s my son in there. He’s crying.” I have my knee on his throat. “You want to sell papers with that? He was kidnapped and you want everyone to see it, to make money from it for your boss. Quite a coup. Well, you won’t sell this.”

  He is gasping. His face is turning red as he grabs my balls.

  “I’m going to fucking kill you!” I scream at him. I am punching his face repeatedly, left then right again and again against the smooth stone paving and I am going to kill him. He is squeezing tighter. I am killing him. I am trying to kill him as Anna is pulling me off. She has her arms around my shoulders. She uses all her strength to drag me off him. Sam is crying inside. He can see everything. The moment Anna has enough of my weight off the photographer he rolls over to where the camera has fallen. Seeing this I break out of Anna’s arms. The photographer is on his feet. He holds the camera in one hand and I lunge at him again.

  “Joe, are you crazy?” Anna calls out.

  But I am. With my right arm I knock the camera from his hand and it falls on the stone again. He jumps back to get away from me. His face is bloodied and I am smashing his camera.

  “Joe!” Anna calls out.

  I jump on his camera till it is unrecognizable, till I am unrecognizable, so that no one will ever recognize Sam from the papers as the boy who was taken, like Eloise and the Chinese girl. I am shouting. The photographer runs past me. He is bleeding and wants to get away. I know how he feels. He makes it out to the street.

  “Have you lost your mind?” Anna says.

  Sam is crying, and I shiver by the swimming pool in the midafternoon sunlight that the real estate agent had promised would hit my backyard at about this time. I shower and wash away the adrenaline and some blood to reveal cuts, strains, sprains, and the beginnings of some bruises. I work out twice a week. Anna thinks it’s three times a week, but the third visit of each week is a phantom. That’s when I used to see Angelique. But twice a week I bench-press, cycle, work on my abs, pecs, biceps, quads, so I’m in pretty good shape. But I don’t fight anymore. I haven’t been in a fight since I played football toward the end of school. So while I’m not in bad shape for an Audi-driving husband and father who smiles at people from the neighborhood when he sees them in the supermarket or at the dry cleaner’s, I am out of shape when it comes to using my hands to kill a man who has seen me coming and does not want to die in the course of his sordid job of photographing a little boy through the windows of his house.

  The hot water stings. I nearly vomit. After the shower I notice that the veins in my arms and feet are horribly distended. I go to bed but not before washing down the analgesics with some vodka, which I keep by the bed. Anna doesn’t notice this. She hasn’t noticed it yet. She’s playing with Sam. I am too tired to return the bottle to the freezer and I wonder if she’ll notice it. If she notices the vodka will she say anything about it and if she doesn’t say anything, will that mean something?

  The leaves of a tall tree caress the outside of our bedroom window. I am utterly alone. There is no sound coming from downstairs. Perhaps Anna has taken Sam to the park. My eyes are closed, but I cannot sleep. Someone should really come and check on me. I bought this house, and I am Sam’s father. These cannot be said to be bad things. No one can say that. How does a person come to be so alone? One is born in it and, somehow, despite parents, siblings, girlfriends, colleagues, a wife—despite finding a wife—I can’t shake it.

  Dennis Mitchell took me to a brothel. He doesn’t judge me. He looks out for me. He has a fine mind. I look forward to seeing him on Monday. I often do. I’ve just realized that. Has he read about it in the paper? Is he aware that the little boy in the news is my son? I should take Sam to work one day, show him off again. Not yet. Let things calm down. I wish I could sleep now. Maybe I can. Maybe I will if I just close my eyes for long enough. It will happen.

  She is here. I don’t believe it. In my half sleep she is here saying something about Sophie, her younger sister, taking Sam to the park. We are alone in the house, in the bed. My eyes are closed. She is running her hand along my skin. It is cool and gently touches the places where I hurt. My muscles are calmed. She seems to know where I ache. She can feel it better than I can. Sliding into bed, she is in her underwear. She whispers something. I can’t hear her properly, but she’s not angry with me. I know this much from her tone. Now she reaches for that part of me I thought she didn’t care to touch again. Her voice is quiet. She speaks slowly. I can just make out her words now that she is under the covers. She is admitting that I was right to do what I did to him. I know who she means—I know what this means. She speaks in waves, and in between the waves she takes me in her mouth. I don’t move. I can’t remember when she last did this, and it is as though she knows that this is what I’m thinking because she tells me as she takes me. She tells me between breaths that she is doing this because of what I did to that man. She sees me differently now, like she used to, and I don’t move in case something changes. She is on top of me. She is younger than she was this morning. My eyes are still closed and I lie still, listening to the sounds she is making. It is like the sea. I take deep surreptitious breaths. I won’t hold for much longer. I want to see her do this. I will need to store it. I want to look, but if I move she might stop. The slightest change and it could all be over. I might spoil it. But if I am to see her down there I will have to look soon. I want to shiver. I can just imagine how she looks with her hair, beautiful thick hair forming a veil behind which she has me in her mouth, in her hands, in her mouth. She moves her tongue along the sides, one then the other, with the flat of her tongue. I will have to look. Soon. Now. I start to raise the covers, slowly, gently. She is not disturbed. Perhaps she hasn’t noticed. A little more. I look down barely moving my head, just slightly off the pillow. My eyes are still largely closed. It is dark down there. I see her hair. She is still going. How much longer will we be able to inhabit this moment? She looks up for a second or two and I’m afraid I have spoiled it. But through the dark I can see her smile. She is smiling, then she licks her lips. She looks younger. Now she goes back down. I slide along the bed just a little. She looks up. She is younger. I can see her face and it’s so like Anna’s face but not the Anna I know who sips her tea. She smiles again and it is not Anna. It is Sophie. Oh God. Oh, sweet young Sophie. I am gone like a train. It’s all out of my control except that now I ache there too. When I stretch out, I feel all the other aches. They have matured. I feel them when I exhale, but that is all I can feel. On the other side of the bed the sheets are stone cold. Below me it is wet. I open my eyes. No one is here. Not Sophie, no one.

  10. The front door unlocks, opens, and then closes downstairs. I hear Anna and Sam with what sounds like Sophie. Things are put down on furniture: car keys, coats or jackets, bags, a ball, maybe a kite.

  “Do you want coffee, Sophe?” Anna calls from the kitchen, and then, “What kind of juice, Sam? . . . Sammy, what kind of juice do you want, sweetheart?”

  Upstairs beside me on the bedside table the vodka is unmoved. I can’t put it back in the freezer now without them seeing it. Why the hell should I be ashamed of it? Why should I be ashamed?

  “Do you want some hel
p, Annie?” her sister calls.

  Right from the beginning I have liked Sophie. I have always wanted her to admire me.

  “No. I’m fine. You stay with Sam and I’ll bring it all in. I’ve got a surprise for you, Sam,” Anna calls.

  What has she said to Sophie? This has changed everything. That bastard has changed everything. I splash some water over me and throw on some loose-fitting clothes. I can’t be a prisoner in the house I bought. What have I done wrong? Decent men do what I did. They don’t steal children. I want it to be Monday already.

  “Sophie, how are you?” I kiss her on the cheek.

  “Better than you from the sound of it. You poor thing.” She gives my shoulder a gentle squeeze.

  “Has Anna told you the whole story?” I ask her, not yet knowing the whole story myself.

  “Yes,” she says, sympathetically, indicating she doesn’t know the half of it.

  We look at each other for a moment across the coffee table. We’re alone. Sam is in the kitchen with Anna. Neither of us knows what to say. Sophie looks like a slightly fairer Anna. She smells beautiful, sitting there, and I imagine telling her my side of the story, all of it. I have certain needs. Do you remember Anna’s boyfriend? What do you remember about him, Sophie? His name was Simon. Did you like him, Sophie? Well, Anna has been having an affair with him. At least, I think she has been. Otherwise why would he tell the police that he had permission to pick Sam up after school? It is something that is so easy to verify, and he was, he is, a bright guy. Isn’t he? So why would he say it? Have you known about this, Sophie? Have you been coming to my house, to my son’s birthday parties, knowing what Anna was doing? Do you like this house? Do you want it? She doesn’t want me, Sophie. Hasn’t for the longest time. I don’t have affairs but . . . has Anna told you? You’d like her. It’s not sleazy. We talk and everything. I see the same one each time. It’s not the way it sounds. You’d like her, Sophie. Yes, of course we’ve done everything you can imagine, but sometimes I just hold her. Women like that. She’s someone I can talk to. You could talk to her. She can be really funny. She remembers things I’ve told her, weeks before, months before. She’s always asking questions. It’s like having a secret friend, whom nobody knows about, and this secret friend wants nothing but good for you. I know what you’re thinking. I don’t understand it either. Do you know whether Anna can tell us? Does Anna know what Angelique was doing there with Simon when the police came? Sophie, do you know? I’m going to miss her. Do I look foolish to you?

  Neither of us knows what to say, so nothing is said and Sophie looks at me. I can feel tears gathering. I pick up the packet of hard candies from the coffee table. No one has touched them since my mother left.

  “Do you want one of these, Sophie? My mother brought them and I can’t seem to sell them, not for love or money.”

  Sophie always has a different boyfriend. They’re all lucky to know her, even briefly. Any man would want her. I don’t meet them. She’ll settle down with one of them sooner or later, for children if for nothing else. I want to know her children. They will hear about me. I will be an outline to them. That’s Sam’s dad, the one over there.

  Neither Anna nor I could have hosted the Sheeres tonight. We are too tired even to accuse and counter-accuse in the privacy of our bedroom. It happens that each of us, independently of the other, has a glass of water and a sleeping pill by our side of the bed tonight. Perhaps hers is a tranquilizer. I am in bed first. She turns out the light. Tomorrow her parents will come. The veneer of my life is on fire. It’s dark in here. We have our backs to each other. Our eyes adjust to something like the world of the blind, and I wish she would touch me. We breathe the same air. Soon it will be midnight. Has she already fallen asleep?

  “Anna,” I whisper.

  The wind taps the tops of the branches against the outside of our window.

  “Anna.”

  “Mmm,” she says eventually. Most of it is air.

  “Anna, her name is Angelique.”

  The house is still. Outside, the branches are at rest. We are both so tired. Perhaps she hasn’t heard me. She does not move, and then I hear her whisper.

  “I know . . . Go to sleep, Joe.”

  11. Mitch, you have to love him. At work everybody seems to know that the little boy in the weekend news was my son. The young woman who sits at the reception desk looks at me with a gentle pity I can’t remember anyone ever bestowing on me. She knows that it was Sam. She even remembers seeing him once. This particular news story has captured her, it has impregnated her and it swells inside her. It consumes her. Throughout the weekend she has told everyone she knows that the little boy on the news, the one who was kidnapped, is the son of one of the guys at work. In the morning before she left for the station to catch the train to sit at the reception desk all day, taking calls and signing for deliveries, she looked at herself in the mirror as she dabbed a little perfume under each ear and on her wrists and she tried to work out what she would say to me about it when she saw me. But when she does see me she can’t bring herself to say anything. Having lived it herself the whole weekend she is exhausted by it and can only say, “Good morning, Mr Geraghty.” Shyly, for I am suddenly a celebrity, albeit one to be pitied.

  Gorman calls me into his office. He wants to commiserate, but commiserating is not something he is good at. It is not a skill he has developed over the decades he has been summoning people into his office. To commiserate properly you need to know how to empathize with another person, or, at least, how to pretend to. Gorman doesn’t. He finds the whole thing unpleasant, not the other person’s misfortune so much as the socially mandated response. Never has he had to find the words to express the response he is meant to have to the kidnapping of someone else’s child.

  “Joseph, Joe, come in. Sit down. What a terrible business. How is everybody?”

  “We’re fine.”

  “And . . . er . . . Simon?”

  “Simon? Do you know . . .”

  “Your son.”

  “Sam.”

  “Oh, yes, Sam, of course. Sam. How is he?”

  “Thanks, he’s well. Probably better than we are.”

  “Really . . . really,” Gorman offered. “Yes, you do look a little . . . er . . . Do you . . . would you like to talk to someone in Human Resources or . . . ?”

  “No, I’m fine, thanks.”

  “Well, we’ve got the retreat coming up. That will . . . er . . . that’s something to look forward to.”

  There are tiny beads of perspiration on Gorman’s forehead. He looks for relief in the handling and contemplation of his letter opener.

  “Your figures are good, Joe. Keep it up. Can you keep it up given . . . what’s the . . . given the circumstances?”

  “I think so.”

  “If you need any time . . .”

  “No. I’ll be fine.”

  “Because we can always find someone . . .”

  “Find someone?”

  “Someone for you to talk to.”

  “No, I’m happy enough talking to clients.”

  “Well, we’re here if you . . . we’re behind you, Joe. Keep up the good work.”

  This is something I have to go through. I now have a new social obligation—to give people the opportunity to offer their respective renditions of an appropriate response to the kidnapping of a colleague’s child. It’s boring, uncomfortable, and time-consuming. That’s why you have to love Dennis Mitchell. He doesn’t say anything about it. He doesn’t even know.

  Mitch would feel obliged, like everybody else, to say something if he knew. Perhaps he hasn’t read the paper. He never does what everybody else does. He doesn’t even talk about what everybody else talks about. When people finish whispering about my family’s descent into the world of tabloid crime, the talk of the office is the Internet start-up Numero-one.com, the Silicon Valley wannabe whose modest pre-float claim was that it would change the way most people did most things. Whatever this meant on closer examination, i
t had resulted in an exponential rise in the price of the company’s shares. Its appeal to investors lay in its offer to its customers of a free .com, .net, or .org domain name for use in setting up a personal, customized Web site.

  Within a year Numero-one was to have signed up three million customers by acquiring the domain names en masse from Wide World Names, the domain name registry of a state university’s publicly listed I.T. spinoff. Over a weekend the deal between Numero-one and the university’s I.T. spinoff fell through. I don’t know why. It was never my stock. It just had a smell about it. That’s what Mitch had told me, quietly, in the tearoom. “Don’t touch it,” he said. The following Monday morning, within approximately twenty minutes, the price fell from seventeen dollars to one dollar sixty.

  When something like this happens, there is usually at least one person in a firm like ours who will come as close as a human can to breaking apart without the application of physical force. Sometimes, not often, you can see it happen before your eyes. If a man puts enough clients in touch with a rising stock he can drive off into the sunset. If he puts enough of the really big boys in touch with a rising stock he can put a deposit on the sunset. Peter Laffenden did exactly that. There was talk that, at twenty-nine, he was going to retire on what he’d made from Numero-one. This morning the sky fell in on him.

  I was talking to Gorman when it happened. By the time Gorman had been reminded of my son’s name, Laffenden was finished. After lunch we’d be able to watch the security camera’s transmission of Laffenden in the underground parking garage trying to fit all his files into the trunk of his Alfa Spider.

  Too much too soon? People will say that. But it’s not my business, only my concern. I could have sold it but I gave it the “Dennis Mitchell” test and I’m still here taxing Gorman’s sympathetic nervous system on the occasion of the abduction of my son. Laffenden, whom they called Laughing Boy while he was making a killing, is in deep trouble. It’s over for Laffenden.